I'll disagree here. Take a soft good-quality pencil (a 1 or 2) and
taste the sharpened end - there's a distinct taste there, and that's
what I'm referencing (don't use a hard pencil or mechanical pencil
lead, there's too much filler). That's a very distinctly different
creature than the aroma of pencil shavings,which is much more
wood-driven.

I'm not familiar enough with Parker's notes to say whether he uses
pencil-lead/graphite interchangeably with pencil shavings, but I don't.
The former (to me)has a distinctly mineral note, more taste than aroma,
the latter is aromatically woody.

Mark Lipton wrote:
> James Silverton wrote:
> > DaleW wrote on 18 Sep 2005 12:42:47 -0700:
> > in the recipe they went for Bordeaux ('96
> > D> Calon-Segur), I followed their lead and went with the 1999
> > D> Leoville-Poyferre. Opened (a small glass poured, but not
> > D> decanted) before the movie, it was smooth and ready by
> > D> dinner time. Clean ripe dark berry/cassis fruit, there's a
> > D> bit of chocolately new oak but even more Medoc earth.
> > D> Graphite and smoke on the finish.
> >
> > Forgive me Dale but "graphite" is a new tasting term to me and, as a
> > chemist, I did not know it had one :-) Can you describe the flavor
> > another way, perhaps?
>
> Yes, this has been troubling me, too. It's used to describe the smell
> of pencil shavings, a smell that is ingrained in those of us of a
> certain age from our school daze. Parker has used "graphite"
> interchangably (IMO) with "pencil shavings," perhaps to sound more
> erudite or probably because he gets bored writing the same descriptors
> over and over and ... Anyone who's ever used graphite to lubricate a
> lock will know that it doesn't have much of a smell and doesn't at all
> resemble pencil shavings, which as you point out smell of the dried red
> cedar wood traditionally used to make the pencils (at least in the US).
> This gets into a different semantic trap, though, because "cedar" is
> also used as a descriptor, but I've always assumed that that refers to
> the live tree, which smells quite differently from a pencil. Hopelessly
> confusing, I realize *sigh*
>
> Mark Lipton
>
> p.s. To add even more confusion to the fire, I only recently learned
> that all the "cedars" native to the US (red, white, incense and Alaska)
> are *not* true cedars (genus Cedrus) but actually members of the same
> family as Cypresses. Go figger...